We repeat segments from a popular program we recently aired about Heist: Who Stole the American Dream
HEIST is a feature documentary which investigates the roots of the current economic crisis, and the ongoing assault on working people in the United States. It tells the hidden story of the systemic, multifaceted corporate attack on the middle class that, starting in the 1970s, transformed America's well-regulated economy into a battlefield littered with foreclosed homes, runaway jobs, and broken dreams. The American economy has been eviscerated due to four decades of deregulation, the outsourcing of forty-million manufacturing jobs, and self-serving tax policies that have created a new class of robber barons. Today's news blames Americans' devastated 401(k)'s and collapsed home values on financial earthquakes within the last two years.
But HEIST traces these seismic shifts back to their roots in the early 1970s. It shows how large corporations - acting through lobbying organizations like the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - began a political mobilization that would propel the largest transfer of wealth in history. The winners were the wealthiest 1% of our population. The losers were ordinary Americans, whose real income has barely increased since 1973.
KBOO will air portions of the film, and talk with the film's directors Donald Goldmacher, a longtime filmmaker, labor advocate, activist, and community psychiatrist with decades of experience observing, documenting and participating in social change.